Welcome to Part 3 of Exploring Beethoven's Piano Sonatas!
I'm delighted to launch another set of new lectures of this course as Part 3. As before, this class is meant for people of all levels of experience with Beethoven's music (including no experience at all!). Remember that you are able to watch the lectures as many times as you like, at whatever pace is comfortable for you.
As I’ve done with the first two sets of Beethoven lectures, I look forward to meeting with students—online and in person, in various cities. The dates and locations will be posted in the Announcements and Events section, as part of the course content. So please remember to check back there for details.
In these four new lectures, we will explore the following sonatas:
• Sonata Op. 10, No. 1
• Sonata Op. 22
• Sonata Op. 31, No. 2
• Sonata Opp. 78, 79, 81a
The Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation supports Curtis’s lifelong learning initiatives.

Taught By

Jonathan Biss

Neubauer Family Chair in Piano Studies

Transcript

So, if the sonata opus 22 finds Beethoven looking contentedly backward, in the sonata op. 31 no. 2, the so-called "Tempest" and the subject of today’s lecture, he is most definitely in trailblazing mode. The "Tempest" was finished in 1802, which means that less than two years separate it from op. 22. Two years, five intervening sonatas, and a whole universe, because this sonata truly belongs to another realm; the rules that governed op. 22 and its predecessors don’t even apply any more. Op. 31 no. 2 is called the "Tempest" because Anton Schindler claimed that Beethoven had the Shakespeare play in mind when he wrote the sonata. The mix of great drama and even greater mystery in this work makes the claim more-or-less feasible, but the fact of the matter is that Schindler had a, shall we say, flexible relationship with the truth. He did know Beethoven well, but scholars say that his rather gossipy biography of the composer was not only gossipy but outright dishonest, so we may as well let go of the idea that the name "Tempest" is authentic. No matter: it doesn’t add to our understanding of the piece, and anyway, the sonata is plenty compelling all on its own. So, this is the sonata Op. 31 no. 2 – it is the second of a trinity of sonatas within that opus. You may remember, from many lectures ago, that as Beethoven was writing the opus 31 sonatas, he wrote a letter to a friend to say that he was embarking on a "new path". This has always seemed slightly strange to me, because it is the preceding four sonatas – opp. 26, 27, and 28 – that mark a clean break with the past, and contain the most formal experiments. But while the op. 31 sonatas might not generally break as much new ground as that previous group, the "Tempest" itself is one of the most forward-looking and adventurous of all of Beethoven’s sonatas. The first movement, in particular – and remember, this sonata is pre-Waldstein, and thus the majority of its action is in the first movement – it's all about blurring structural lines. It uses the Pathetique’s gambit of taking what seems to be an introduction, and insinuating it into the rest of the movement – and then takes that gambit several steps further. In the case of the Pathetique, it was at times difficult to say if the introduction was, structurally speaking, a separate entity from the rest of the movement. In the Tempest, the introduction is so thoroughly incorporated into the movement, I’m not even sure it can be called an introduction. That is the modus operandi of the first movement of the Tempest: because it is so structurally nebulous, it is unsettling, and because it is unsettling, it is riveting.

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